A need for diverse thinking drives Mayo Clinic's efforts to attract and develop future scientists from diverse backgrounds, and Mayo Clinic Research is working to make sure underrepresented groups have a voice and support.
On a mission to remedy health disparities — comparatively poor outcomes for certain populations with certain health conditions — Margaret Akinhanmi learned a disturbing fact: People of African descent with bipolar disorder often are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia.
A predoctoral student in clinical and translational science at Mayo Clinic, Akinhanmi scoured clinical records and research articles. She found a glaring lack of biological and genomic research involving black patients, some of whom struggled with bipolar disorder while taking the wrong medication for 10 years or more.
That's unfortunately not an uncommon roadblock for research. And Mayo's Research leaders say that scientists of color, like Akinhanmi, are needed to remedy health disparities and the chronic scarcity of racial and ethnic minorities in medical studies.
A quest to find answers
Akinhanmi came to Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences after completing a bachelor's degree in biological science at the University of Georgia and a one-year program in genomics research at Washington University in St. Louis. At Mayo, she has focused on examining factors that influence effective treatment for specific populations.
For her project on bipolar disorder in blacks, Akinhanmi wanted to clarify potential reasons behind misdiagnosis. She analyzed clinical data to see if there are differences in symptoms in African-Americans.